The Valley (19 page)

When he talked to other boys from school or Highgate Lane, Roy told them he had grand ambitions which would materialise with or without the help of teachers at school. He was going to travel and get a good job that would take him away from Highgate. He wasn’t going down the pit, nor living in a pit village: he wanted to be where people didn’t crowd together and find comfort in being like everyone else. When
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
came to the Dearne’s cinema screens the boys, particularly the ones from the grammar school, started calling him Mitty Hollingworth, but Roy couldn’t care less. One day, he said, he would just get on a motorbike and take off to travel the world, never to return. Either that or he would join the Army.

*

After leaving school at fifteen, Roy did go to work at Highgate pit, but he left after four months to work at another scrap-metal yard in Highgate. The scrap business was prospering because of the replacement of old plant in the pit yards. Roy learnt to operate a crane and was paid a good wage of £3 17 shillings a week. With the money he had left after paying board to Winnie he set about a course of self-improvement involving Charles Atlas magazine subscriptions, membership of the Clarion Club and an acquired appreciation of jazz. Harry taught him to drive the family Daimler. In his late teens, he sees himself as a free spirit. His desire to get out of the nosey, backward Dearne Valley and see the world is, he thinks, a feeling that links him to other progressive people such as he hears on the radio or sees on the TV. At six o’clock every Saturday, after the family has shared fish and chips for tea, and Harry is smoking a cigarette and thinking about going to get a wash, Roy sits beside the radio, eyes closed, listening to
Jazz Club
and imagining himself far away and in better company. Pauline complains about the din and his dad grumbles about some of the modern tunes, but Roy ignores them and plans his adventures. All he needs is an opportunity.

The Army is his easiest escape route, and when his mam tells her stories about Walter in the Great War, he tells her he might join up before he’s due for National Service. Merely considering this, he feels, sets him apart from the valley drudges, so he enjoys discussing it. Winnie is unsure and tells him to take care. However much she wishes otherwise, she knows Roy is not like her father, and worries that he has too much Hollingworth in him. Walter had an instinct for discipline and self-sacrifice but Roy is a seeker of experience and pleasure. She is not certain that discipline and self-sacrifice can be learned. ‘They say the Army makes or breaks them,’ she warns. ‘Be careful.’ Roy nods, but privately puts her comments down to a lack of imagination.

*

In the summer of 1951, the Army comes to Roy Hollingworth in the form of his National Service call-up. On arriving at Catterick, he holds back his jazz attitude and he and the Army get along well. ‘Good build, fairly intelligent, and generally a moderate scholar,’ the officer assessing him notes; ‘healthy interests. Sensible, cooperative manner.’ After eighteen weeks of training he is assigned to the Royal Tank Regiment at Tidworth, on the eastern edge of Salisbury Plain, and shortly after that is sent to the Suez Canal Zone in Egypt.

Soldiers who Roy talks to say the Canal Zone is the worst posting in the Army, worse even than Korea. It is a long hot strip of RAF bases, small towns and Army camps running alongside the canal and its tributaries in the Egyptian desert. After the end of the Second World War, Britain had kept its forces in the Canal Zone and retained control of the canal and its approaches, but in October 1951 the Egyptian government revoked its treaty allowing Britain to maintain its bases. There has been fighting between British and Egyptian forces, and between British soldiers and Egyptian civilians: local people are hostile because of the British government’s support for the creation of the State of Israel, while the British and the Americans are concerned that the Soviet Union is gaining power in the region by supporting Egypt. And all the politicians want access to Middle Eastern oil because it is a cheaper fuel than coal.

Brimful of bluster, Private Roy Hollingworth, Army No. 22494282, 4th Royal Tank Regiment, leaves on a troopship from Liverpool, the first member of the family to travel abroad since Walter Parkin went to the Western Front. He is stationed at Shandur Camp, a mass of tents on the western bank of the Suez Canal, near a small town called Fayed. From inside the camp he can see across to the Egyptian territory in the Sinai Desert bank, where soldiers, cars and the occasional tank come and go in the shimmering daytime heat, and at night people randomly fire off rounds across the water. This is active service and discipline is strict; the days under the limp regimental and Union flags are spent on drills, training, guard patrols, parades, and scrimming up vehicles with yellow camouflage net. The canal stinks. The drinking water, brought in by escorted tanker because the filtration plant has been blown up, tastes of chlorine. There are no dances and no women. There are only risky trips into Fayed, drinking your weekly pay in the form of the thin, gassy Egyptian beer, and telling each other stories about the murdered soldiers’ bodies dragged from the fetid canals.

Roy studies the tanks, learns to build bridges, and trains to get his gunner’s trade certificate. In the evenings he takes his chances in Fayed with his best mate, a Northamptonshire lad called John McNeill, and enjoys himself. Some of the men at the base say the bloody wogs’ll slit your throat as soon as look at you, but Roy and John banter with the street traders, and bargain for lighters, watches, dirty postcards, duty-free cameras and drinks in exchange for British postal orders. The traders smile at Roy and dub him Gary Cooper. He ventures into areas that are supposed to be too dangerous for British soldiers to walk around in, and encounters no trouble. The life is hard, but for all the rough living, sandstorms, dysentery and danger, in the first few months of his service in Egypt, Roy feels as fulfilled as he ever will in his life.

Then one morning a long column of Egyptian tanks, field guns and troop carriers comes down the road on the Sinai side of the canal and lines up opposite Shandur, guns pointing across the water. Shandur camp mobilises; officers shout orders, and young soldiers scurry between machines, the sun-ripened smell of the canal now overlaid by the smell of oil and diesel. The men move the tanks and guns to their canal bank, pointing back. Just a show, a sergeant tells Roy, they’re always doing it, but the younger soldiers are afraid, and so is Roy. The Egyptian tanks are Soviet-made and, as Roy will tell people when he goes home, he feels as if a world war could be started by someone accidentally leaving off a rifle’s safety catch.

After two days the British bring in more armour and the outnumbered Egyptians move off in a long, dusty column. The danger seems to have passed, but now at night, when the temperature drops, the roadways seem full of shadows and any movement feels threatening. Roy’s patrol is shot at. Armoured vehicles with their hatches open have grenades tossed in, and someone inside has to calmly pick them up and sling them out again. At the end of patrols, Roy is twitching from the adrenaline and cannot sleep until he has killed it with gassy beer and stories.

There is another story, one that he tells no one until thirty years after his return from Egypt. In this one, he and another soldier are patrolling on foot somewhere outside the camp in the cold desert night when they hear gunshots. The man beside him cries out, and falls to the ground. Roy carries him back to the camp, but the man later dies. To deaden the shock Roy drinks beer until he is blind drunk. When Roy tells his daughter this story in the 1980s, he will be an alcoholic capable of drinking a bottle of vodka before 11 a.m., and the story will be offered as explanation. He will say he learned to drink to forget when he was in Egypt, and that he still drinks to make himself forget the things he saw there. Most of his family will be sceptical about this claim, and certainly if he wrote home about such experiences then Winnie and Harry did not
receive the letters. The little mail that does arrive from him is upbeat and bullish. The story they will remember best is about a black-robed young woman who, one night in Fayed, thrust a baby at Roy and asked for half a crown. ‘He says he went into a town,’ they tell people who ask how their son is getting on in the Army, ‘and an Arab woman tried to sell him her baby! For 2/6!’

When Roy returns to the Dearne Valley on terminal leave in the early summer of 1953, he comes as the conquering hero, greeting the family with a
Salaam!
around the back door, and introducing John McNeill, whom he has brought back because it’s John’s birthday that week and Roy thinks that they should give him a party. He distributes gifts of watches and jewellery to the family, and claims to have been mistaken for Max Bygraves on the train. He tells jokes and stories about tanks lined up along the Suez Canal, and of men getting their throats slit. He takes John out drinking, and he organises the party with Winnie. And then after three days he leaves again, taking John with him, and telling no one when he will be back, or where he is going. The family will not hear from him for several months, this being the beginning of a pattern of unpredictable departures and absences that will continue for much of his life. When Winnie is older she will feel that she knows what to blame for it. ‘I told him,’ she will say, ‘I said the Army makes them or it breaks them. And when it came to our Roy, it broke him.’

21 Stars

Highgate, 1953

As soon as the date of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation is announced after the death of her father, King George VI, in February 1952, the women of Highgate form a committee to raise money to celebrate with a party. Through the winter and spring Winnie and Granny Illingworth go from house to house and shop to shop, cadging sixpences, shillings and promises of prizes for the raffle, always on Fridays, because Friday is pay day, when everyone pays off their tick, buys treats for the kids, and chucks their change into the collection tins. With the other women who are collecting, they plan and schedule the day. The event is to be held in Benny Slater’s field, and the food served in the club; there will be stalls and games, a tea, children’s fancy dress, and on the Saturday a dance at the Welfare Hall with an exhibition by a ballroom formation team from Doncaster. At night there will be a spectacular finale of fireworks on the field organised, at his own insistence, by Juggler Hollingworth.

Harry’s enjoyment and connoisseurship of fires and explosions expresses itself in a particular passion for fireworks and bonfires. He is one of several fathers in Highgate who every autumn persuades friends at the pit to save big, railway-sleeper-size lumps of coal to put on the Guy Fawkes Night bonfires in the yards, and every October he drives to the Standard factory in Huddersfield to buy a four-by-two-foot crate of mixed fireworks, some of which he sells to other people, and most of which he lets off himself in timed displays.

Harry had begun his planning for the coronation firework display immediately, urging the women to allocate as much of the budget as they could to it, and then topping up the kitty with his own money. ‘It sounds like a lot to me,’ says Winnie, when he tells the family his plans one teatime that spring. ‘Are you sure you can manage that many crackers?’

‘Manage?’ he says. ‘I’m a qualified shot-firer.’

‘You
were
. But crackers’ll be different to what you had in t’ pit.’

He holds his knife and fork between his plate and mouth, pausing for effect. ‘Is tha trying to tell me about explosives now?’ he says with mock indignation. ‘I’ll get some scaffolding up,’ and – turning to Pauline – ‘we’ll have a right do. It’ll be like Buckingham Palace.’

‘Lovely,’ says Pauline.

‘Scaffolding?’ says Winnie.

Winnie, meanwhile, works on the costumes for the children’s fancy dress competition. She makes a Little Bo Peep dress and bonnet for Lynda, and for Pauline she borrows a gypsy fortune-teller’s outfit. Pauline however is shy, and tries to find reasons for not taking part.

‘I’m
pale
, Mam. Gypsies have got brown skin.’

‘We’ll put gravy browning on you.’

‘
Gravy
?
’

‘Gravy
browning
.’

She says this as if putting gravy browning on your skin is something people always do on royal occasions.

‘And Our Muv says she’s got summat for it as well,’ says Winnie. ‘She’ll bring it when she comes.’

Annie’s summat is socks: white ankle socks with red-white-and-blue tops, knitted for the occasion, and produced from her bag when she arrives at Win’s at teatime the day before the celebrations.

‘Do you think gypsies wear ankle socks, Muv?’ asks Pauline, as she plays with Annie’s swollen thumb. The poisoning has never fully gone away, and Pauline likes to knead the fat little cushion of flesh between her fingers.

‘They do now, love,’ says Annie. ‘They’re all t’ fashion. I’ve got a gypsy girl comes to me, you know.’

‘I know,’ says Pauline, who has heard the story before.

‘She watches over me. Have I to read your tea leaves?’

‘Yes please.’ Pauline knows what is coming, because Annie reads her leaves every time they meet. It is always the same: swirl the cup three times, tip it in the saucer, and, Ooh, one day you’re going to meet a tall dark handsome man. Pauline prefers the crystal ball, whose scenarios are more varied.

After tea Annie and Winnie hang up bunting in the sitting room. Lynda plays among the trailing strings, and Pauline irons their fancy dress costumes. Soon the back door latch rattles and the door swings open, and there is a babble of voices as Sonny and May and their young daughters Carole, Amanda and Heather bundle through into the sitting room. ‘Now then, are you all ready for tomorrow?’ everyone says. ‘What are you going in t’ fancy dress as?’; ‘Where did you get those socks, Pauline?’ Sonny says he is singing in a concert with the Thurnscoe male voice choir tomorrow, and gives the room a few lines from the song programme. Winnie looks at the clock and wonders where Harry is. He is supposed to be setting up the scaffolding in Benny Slater’s field, but he’s been out there since dinnertime. There is another rattle of the latch, then a man crooning ‘
We’re poor little lambs 
.
.
.’ and a woman saying, ‘I’ll give you poor little lambs!’ and Danny, Millie and their children come through the door, laughing. They want to know what Juggler’s playing at, because he was supposed to be ready and waiting to go up to the club.